Hey everyone, today we’re going to take a look at what’s new with the Lingonaut Project this month!

Build 30: The Bound to our Leap

Lingonaut is developed with the Leaps and Bounds principle in mind. First You Leap – make lots of progress quickly, then you Bound – you dig into your new position and reinforce what you just did.

For us that means one month we add a ton of new code and features, like last month with our biggest update ever, and then the next month we focus on polishing up those new additions! We fix all the bugs those new features brought with them with help from our beta testers.

This month has been a ‘Bounds’ month, where we’ve been taking in and triaging all the bugs people have been having, both with the app itself as well as the courses!

That’s not just fixing the actual bugs but adding new features and suggestions to Creatonaut – the software our volunteers use to create language courses.

That’s enough of an introduction though – lets go over all the new developments!

Creatonaut Roundtable and new features!

Last week we had a live roundtable discussion with our translatonaut team, to ask them:

• How the core team can help make their job easier
• What features they would like to see in Creatonaut
• Features in Lingonaut they think would enhance the learning experience
• What bugs are interfering with their workflow
• How we can keep morale high

Everyone was told to be as honest and as candid as possible and we were able to boil down the biggest changes that could make developing new courses so much easier!

1. New keyboard shortcuts that allow creators to quickly flit between text fields instead of having to reach for the mouse all the time
2. Stop PickWords from shunting all the possible answers into one field which then requires manual fixing
3. Have ImagePick always test English to Target Language
4. Let the creator adjust the difficulty and weight of the questions
5. Instead of having to record every question separately, switch to a audio bank that can automagically bind to questions or allow the creator to reuse recordings. (We also estimate a 20% storage saving for course archives too!)
6. Allow the reorganisation of Vocab tables so changes and overhauls to existing content doesn’t feel out of place.
7. Increase accuracy of the simulator so creators can see exactly what their questions would look like

We have vastly expanded the customisability that creators can use when making their questions too!

As I lead the development team and our Translation team liaison leads our course creation efforts, I don’t always get to talk directly to those doing the hard part of making Lingonaut a reality. It was humbling to hear about all the work being put into making our mission a success first-hand.

As always, Creatonaut is free for everyone and can be found here:

Roadmap for Web or Android, we can have one by the end of the year

We’ve almost finished onboarding our second dedicated developer, and I look forward to introducing you all to them soon. In the meantime we’ve been working on the Android app and web client, both of which have been highly requested by everyone.

Because we’re developing natively on Android, Web and iOS (see our commitment to ensure no platform is treated as a ‘second-class citizen’, each version needs time to cook!

At our current levels of funding and manpower, we can currently afford to get the alpha version of ONE out by the end of the year. Between Web and Android, Patrons are voting on the course of Lingonaut as we speak.

For Web, the Advantages are:

• We are further along with the web client development than the android port
• It’s more feasible to get web out first as android is much more of a pain to develop for than either iOS or Web
• Having a web app means that Android users can still experience Lingonaut on their android via the browser!
• It will be cheaper for us to develop and easier on our dwindling pot

For Android, the Advantages are:

• We foresee many more people using Android than Web
• For these learners having a Native Android app will be a more pleasant and less janky experience
• It’ll give us much needed experience on Android development for our in development Parity Framework, a tool which we’ll use to allow for simultaneous development across the two mobile platforms while keeping each one native.

Once again, because of our every-class-is-first-class policy, you can rest assured that the polish and quality of the web and android client will be at parity with the iOS app.

We will continue work on the both ports in the background, but if you want to help us to make it a reality, you know what to do,

We won’t be making the same mistake we did with the iOS beta – it will not be released until its in a state we are happy and proud of, regardless of pressure.

Terrestrial Tier Patrons and above will get access to the new client ~3 months before the Open Beta

Venus, Mercury and Lapsed Patrons will get access to the new client ~1 month before the Open Beta

(This is to add more value to the higher tiers and also help with surviving long enough to get it out!)

If you want to support the mission and help us get Android and Web over the finish line (and it is desperately needed, costs are going up and funding is going down) please take a look at becoming a Patron. You will get unique perks and cosmetics as well as our gratitude!

Fixes for German and Finnish

Thousands of people have been trying out our new German and Finnish courses, and as our first new courses aside from Czech they’ve had quite bumpy roll-outs.

We’ve been taking in bug-reports from across Discord, Reddit and the Forums and will be rolling out fixed versions of the courses soon.

Among other changes we’re modifying the NautML language to accept multiple answers for questions which ask you to use a wordbank.

Czech course overhaul finally here

The long awaited Czech overhaul is finally here. We’ve fixed Adjectives and Nouns with new questions and added a new ‘I am’ skill!

We hope the new additions will help you along your language learning journey. I know a lot of people started learning the language when it was the only one Lingonaut had, and I’m glad so much of you have grown to love it.

Theme support and accessibility changes

Although the focus was not on features this month, in a bid to address some of the accessibility issues we’ve added a new dark theme. Some learners had issues reading the text against the default starry background so this change will make things more readable for them.

The theming feature will be fully fleshed out in the full release, with seasonal themes, Patreon exclusives and more!

Bug squashing and polishing up

Like we said, this update is all about the Bound to reinforce the Leap!

This has meant a solid month of hunting down and squishing bugs left and right, as well and polishing up the existing interface to make it look more in line with a finished app.

A big change that people were asking for is making the language selection screen clearer!

What’s that? A selector for different types of courses? Stay tuned to find out more!

Below is a full Changelog for the latest build once it releases:

All in all, it means you should have a much nicer experience using Lingonaut!

What’s coming in the next Leap?

Our focus for the next update is singular: Implementing The Practice Hub

The grayed out dumbell has taunted us plenty but we’ll finally be able to open up the practice hub to everyone, allowing you to:

1. Practice your mistakes, earn additional xp
2. Create tailored practice lessons of your own
3. Create and use flashcards from your accumulated word bank
4. A wordbook – where all the words you’ve encountered so far in the course are found.

Epilogue

That’s all for today! I hope you’ve been happy with all the new developments and I’ll catch you here same-ish time next month with all-new updates and content!

Lingonaut Build 30 releases on the fourth of November.